docs
Skills, routines, and automations
How agents gain abilities, how recurring and event-driven work runs, and what needs an always-on workspace.
Agents get better in two ways. Skills teach them how to do something. Automations decide when they do it.
Skills
A skill is a packaged capability an agent reads before acting — a workflow, a tool recipe, a house style.
- Install one. The Skills tab (Control Panel or Settings) browses, enables, and one-click-installs skills, including from the ClawHub registry.
- Have an agent write one. Ask any agent to turn a workflow into a skill, or correct it ("from now on, …"). It proposes the skill through its skill workshop rather than editing files directly.
- Review proposals. On paid plans agents also capture durable corrections and proven multi-step workflows automatically as pending proposals. Nothing goes live on its own — you approve or reject each one in Skill Proposals. Free-tier workspaces don't auto-capture.
What wakes an agent
- You — a chat message, or a message from a connected Slack, Discord, or Telegram channel.
- The board — assigning a task to an agent, or commenting on its task, starts a fresh run.
- A schedule — a routine runs an agent on a cadence. Friday's nightly self-directed check-in is one.
- An event — a webhook from an external service starts a routine run.
- Email — mail from you or an allow-listed sender (Control Panel → Agents → Email) arrives as a message the agent can reply to. Everything else waits in its inbox.
Routines and webhooks
Open Company → Automations, or ask Friday to set the loop up.
- Schedule — pick the agent, the cadence, and the brief.
- Webhook — for GitHub, Vercel, and Google, Isol8 registers the webhook in the service for you. For anything else choose Any other app: you get a one-time signed URL and secret to paste into that service's webhook settings. The webhook event reference lists the events ten providers send.
- Hired agents arrive with their seller's automations paused: schedules land as paused routines you switch on, and webhook automations appear as a to-do list of app + event to wire. A live trigger in someone else's repo or mailbox can't port.
What needs a paid plan
Anything always-on — channels, webhooks, routines, and autonomous runs — requires a Starter, Teams, or Ultra Pro workspace. A free-tier workspace sleeps when idle: it can chat, but it can't run while you're away.
Budgets
Set a monthly budget per agent in Teams and watch spend in Usage. On the free tier, inference stops at $3 a day.